ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 27, 1996 TAG: 9611270016
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: RANDOLPH E. SCHMID ASSOCIATED PRESS
AT THE SAME TIME, married couples with children have declined to just over one-fourth of all households today.
The times may be changing - again.
After two decades of social revolution during which baby boomers steered America away from ``Ozzie and Harriet'' and toward new living arrangements such as group homes like ``Friends,'' the trend seems to be slowing.
Families - households whose members are related by marriage, birth or adoption - made up 70.0 percent of America's 98.9 million households last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. While that's down from 81.2 percent in 1970, most of that change occurred in the first 20 years. The figure was 70.8 percent in 1990.
``It seems that things have plateaued,'' said Census statistician Ken Bryson. ``It's very hard to predict the future. But I certainly don't see things that cause me to believe things will be drastically different in the future.''
Carol De Vita of the private Population Reference Bureau said the reason for the stability is that baby boomer households are settling down.
``I wouldn't expect tremendous change until another 10 years from now when baby boom children will be mostly off to college and the oldest (boomers) start to think about early retirement,'' said De Vita, a senior researcher for the independent population analysis group.
The 1970s marked the biggest change in families and households, a time when the first of the post-World War II baby boomers were reaching adulthood.
``That decade was much more likely than now to be a decade of substantial tumult of various kinds,'' Bryson observed. Change continued into the 1980s but has lessened markedly since 1990, the report shows.
Married couples with children have declined to just over one-fourth of all households these days, about the same share as single people living alone, according to the report: ``Household and Family Characteristics: March 1995.''
Their share of households dropped from 40.3 percent in 1970 to 26.3 percent in 1990 and was 25.5 percent last year, a change attributed to the increasing number of divorces and increased number of single-parent households.
The number of households with just one person grew from 17.1 percent of all households in 1970 to 24.6 percent in 1990 and 25.0 percent in 1995.
Nearly half of the women living alone were 65 or older and 44 percent were widows. In contrast, nearly three-fourths of men living alone were ages 25 to 64 and half had never married.
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